Posts Tagged ‘gentrification’

Tweet If you’ve seen the curvy and colorful cob structures around the city of Portland, chances are good that you’re seeing the work of the Village Building Convergence (VBC), an annual placemaking festival organized by City Repair which is celebrating its 15th year. The 10-day festival is underway this week and its going stronger than ever. It’s main mission is to facilitate hands-on volunteer labor towards making various community-building projects around the city become a reality. This year’s projects include 22 intersection painting projects, 8 landscaping/gardening projects and 9 building projects, such as making earthen plaster walls for buildings, cob…

Tweet Portland is the birthplace of the food cart pod, a cluster of food carts on an empty lot, usually a parking lot. Food cart pods have become a fixture in the city and new ones seem to be popping up all the time. But more and more, as the development craze is taking over neighborhoods, old and established food cart pods are disappearing too. It’s true that the whole premise of food carts is that they are temporary. Food carts are often used to revitalize a barren empty lot. In a way, they are a victim of their own…

Tweet According to some of the comments I received on my article yesterday, Gentrification Hits Home: My Rent Goes Up and the $8 Sundae at Salt & Straw, I AM the problem that I am facing – being priced out of my cute studio near Hawthorne. Because I chose to move to Portland seeking a walkable lifestyle, I am displacing native Oregonians. I guess I should have just stayed in the apartment building in Maputo, Mozambique, the place where my family lived when I was born to avoid displacing other people. But if you go further back than that, I…

Tweet Last week I heard a shuffle at my front door and saw that my building manager was slipping a notice under my door. I opened it only to read that my rent was being raised by 10%! I have lived in this cute little studio in the coveted Sunnyside Neighborhood in inner Southeast Portland for just over a year now. During this time, my rent has gone up a total of 14%. If it continues at this pace, I’ll have to find another place to live because I’ll be priced out of my very walkable, very centrally-located neighborhood. The…

Tweet Yesterday, I attended a wonderful museum bike tour where we visited the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center that displays the history of Japanese internment camps in Portland. And later we visited the Oregon Historical Society, and saw the All Aboard: Railroading and Portland’s Black Community exhibit, which is running through April 21st. As we looked through these exhibits of past acts of discrimination that Oregon committed, including institutionalized segregation, there was some discussion as to how it’s had a ripple effect to today. One person joked that it’s hard to tell that Oregon isn’t segregated today, as Portland is so…